Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [23]
“. . . and finally,” Garvin said, “let me introduce someone that many of you know, but some of you do not, the new Vice President for Advanced Operations and Planning, Meredith Johnson.”
There was scattered, brief applause as Johnson got up from her seat and walked to a podium at the front of the room. In her dark blue suit, she looked the model of corporate correctness, but she was strikingly beautiful. At the podium, she put on horn-rimmed glasses and lowered the conference room lights.
“Bob has asked me to review the way the new structure will work,” she said, “and to say something about what we see happening in the coming months.” She bent over the podium, where a computer was set up for presentations. “Now, if I can just work this thing . . . let me see . . .”
In the darkened room, Don Cherry caught Sanders’s eye and shook his head slowly.
“Ah, okay, here we are,” Johnson said, at the podium. The screen behind her came to life. Animated images generated by the computer were projected onto the screen. The first image showed a red heart, which broke into four pieces. “The heart of DigiCom has always been its Advanced Products Group, which consists of four separate divisions as you see here. But as all information throughout the world becomes digital, these divisions will inevitably merge.” On the screen, the pieces of the heart slid back together, and the heart transformed itself into a spinning globe. It began to throw off products. “For the customer in the near future, armed with cellular phone, built-in fax modem, and hand-held computer or PDA, it will be increasingly irrelevant where in the world he or she is and where the information is coming from. We are talking about the true globalization of information, and this implies an array of new products for our major markets in business and education.” The globe expanded and dissolved, became classrooms on all continents, students at desks. “In particular, education will be a growing focus of this company as technology moves from print to digital displays to virtual environments. Now, let’s review exactly what this means, and where I see it taking us.”
And she proceeded to do it all—hypermedia, embedded video, authoring systems, work-group structures, academic sourcing, customer acceptance. She moved on to the cost structures—projected research outlays and revenues, five-year goals, offshore variables. Then to major product challenges—quality control, user feedback, shorter development cycles.
Meredith Johnson’s presentation was flawless, the images blending and flowing across the screen, her voice confident, no hesitation, no pauses. As she continued, the room became quiet, the atmosphere distinctly respectful.
“Although this is not the time to go into technical matters,” she said, “I want to mention that new CD drive seek times under a hundred milliseconds, combined with new compression algorithms, should shift the industry standard for CD to full-res digitized video at sixty fields per second. And we are talking about platform-independent RISC processors supported by 32-bit color active-matrix displays and portable hard copy at 1200 DPI and wireless networking in both LAN and WAN configurations. Combine that with an autonomously generated virtual database—especially when ROM-based software agents for object definition and classification are in place—and I think we can agree we are looking at prospects for a very exciting future.”
Sanders saw that Don Cherry’s mouth was hanging open. Sanders leaned over to Kaplan. “Sounds like she knows her stuff.”
“Yes,” Kaplan said, nodding. “The demo queen. She started out doing demos. Appearance has always been her strongest point.” Sanders glanced at Kaplan; she looked away.
But then the speech ended. There was applause as the lights came up, and Johnson went back to her seat. The room broke up, people heading back to work. Johnson left Garvin, and went directly to Don Cherry, said a few words to him. Cherry smiled: the charmed geek. Then Meredith went across the room to Mary Anne, spoke